Mr. Trump’s about-face on NATO was only part of a day of flip flops at the White House. Within a matter of hours, the president determined that China is not a currency manipulator after all, embraced the Export-Import Bank that he once called unnecessary and suggested he might keep Janet Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairwoman he said he would replace after her term expired. Most striking, he pivoted 180 degrees on Russia, lashing it for supporting rogue nations after years of praising President Vladimir V. Putin.

The Russia reversal and the NATO turnabout were inherently linked, of course. As Russia appears more ominous, NATO seems more necessary. But the shift in attitude also offered one of the starkest examples yet of Mr. Trump’s evolving views on domestic and foreign policy, as the first president ever elected without political or military experience settles into the role of commander in chief.

“We must not be trapped by the tired thinking that so many have, but apply new solutions to face new circumstances, and that’s all throughout the world,” Mr. Trump said at his news conference with Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general.

The president’s support for NATO heartened Mr. Stoltenberg and European leaders who one after the other have tried to impress upon Mr. Trump the value of the alliance, especially Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.

“In a more dangerous and more unpredictable world, it is important to have friends and allies,” Mr. Stoltenberg said at the White House on Wednesday. “And in NATO, America has the best friends and the best allies in the world.”

Mr. Trump’s campaign criticism of NATO stunned many at home and abroad, especially when he suggested conditioning America’s commitment to defend its treaty allies on whether they had met their financial obligations. Just days before taking office, he dismissed the alliance as “obsolete.” No new American president had ever come to power expressing such disdain for NATO.

Mr. Trump’s shift on NATO has been a stutter-step transition. When he hosted Mrs. May a week after taking office in January, she turned to him at a joint news conference afterward and tried to put on the record what he had told her in private. “You confirmed that you’re 100 percent behind NATO,” she told him. He did not contradict her but he did not confirm it, either.

Even as Vice President Mike Pence traveled to Europe a few weeks later to reassure allies, Mr. Trump back home pressed his case that NATO allies do not spend enough on their own defense. “Many of these countries are very rich countries,” he complained at a rally in Florida. “They’re not paying their bills. They’re not paying their bills.” When Ms. Merkel visited last month, a British newspaper reported that Mr. Trump asked her to pay back unmet defense obligations from the last 15 years, forcing the White House to deny that he actually presented her with an invoice.

Mr. Trump’s drumbeat about spending by allies may be having an effect. He is simply repeating the same grievance lodged by other presidents, including Mr. Obama. But Mr. Trump does it louder and more insistently, forcing the issue to the front of the agenda in a way that Mr. Obama’s polite nudging did not.

Only five of the 28 members of NATO met their target of spending 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense last year in accord with a 2014 agreement during Mr. Obama’s tenure, but Mr. Stoltenberg reported that the number would rise to eight by next year.

“President Trump is no different” from other presidents in complaining about allied spending, but “he has been far more aggressive in his statements and frankly, I think that’s had some effect,” said Joseph W. Ralston, a retired Air Force general and former NATO supreme allied commander.

Mr. Trump’s other main criticism of NATO appears to have had less impact. During the campaign, he said the alliance did not fight terrorism, which was not exactly the case. NATO has had troops in Afghanistan fighting terrorists since shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has provided assistance to Iraq in its own war against extremists.

Without directly contradicting Mr. Trump, Mr. Stoltenberg in his very diplomatic way reminded the president of that on Wednesday.

“Allies sent Awacs surveillance planes to help patrol American skies and we launched NATO’s biggest military operation ever in Afghanistan,” Mr. Stoltenberg said. “Hundreds of thousands of Europeans and Canadian soldiers have served shoulder to shoulder with American troops. More than 1,000 have paid the ultimate price. Our mission in Afghanistan is a major contribution to the fight against international terrorism.”

Still, he agreed “that NATO can and must do more in the global fight against terrorism.”

Mr. Trump claimed credit for turning the alliance around on terrorism. “I complained about that a long time ago and they made a change and now they do fight terrorism,” he said.

But he did not explain what change he meant and a subsequent inquiry to the White House for elaboration went unanswered. NATO created a new intelligence division headed by an assistant secretary general last year, but the idea predated Mr. Trump.

“It’s to better deal with hybrid warfare and crisis management, not just terrorism, but it will help in C.T. as well,” Alexander R. Vershbow, who served until last year as deputy secretary general of NATO, said, using initials for counterterrorism. There has been “nothing really new on terrorism beyond this.”

Still, NATO supporters welcomed the turnaround. Just this week, Mr. Trump signed ratification papers clearing the way for Montenegro to join as the alliance’s 29th member — over Russian objections — and he plans to make his first foreign visit as president to the NATO summit meeting in Brussels next month.

Mr. Ralston, the former NATO commander, said Mr. Trump’s criticisms have done some good but the president is now gaining a fuller understanding of NATO from his own team, which has considerable experience with the alliance and includes Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser. Mr. Ralston recalled that John F. Kelly, the retired Marine general who is now secretary of Homeland Security, served as his special assistant at NATO.

“The president is getting advice from different people now than he did in the campaign,” Mr. Ralston said. “These guys are very good and I’m sure they’re giving their unvarnished advice to the president and I think the president is learning from that.”

Updated 7:33 am, Thursday, April 13, 2017

Photo: Ivan Sekretarev, AP

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov speaks to the media during a shared news conference with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson following their talks in Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, April 12, 2017. Amid a fierce dispute over Syria, the United States and Russia agreed Wednesday to work together on an international investigation of a Syrian chemical weapons attack last week.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov speaks to the media during a shared news conference with US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson following their talks in Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, April 12, 2017. Amid a

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, right, and US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson look at each other as they shake hands after the news conference following their talks in Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, April 12, 2017. Amid a fierce dispute over Syria, the United States and Russia agreed Wednesday to work together on an international investigation of a Syrian chemical weapons attack last week.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, right, and US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson look at each other as they shake hands after the news conference following their talks in Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, April

Syria's Ambassador to the United Nations Bashar Ja'afari address Security Council after a resolution vote condemning Syria's use of chemical weapons failed to pass, Wednesday, April 12, 2017 at U.N. headquarters.

United Nations U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley address the Security Council after a vote on a resolution condemning Syria's use of chemical weapons failed, Wednesday, April 12, 2017 at U.N. headquarters.

United Nations U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley address the Security Council after a vote on a resolution condemning Syria's use of chemical weapons failed, Wednesday, April 12, 2017 at U.N. headquarters.

Photo: Bebeto Matthews, AP

US berates Syria at OPCW meeting on Syria chemical attack

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Syrian authorities — "abetted by Russia's continuing efforts to bury the truth" — still possess and use chemical weapons, an American diplomat told the international chemical weapons watchdog on Thursday.

The strong comments by Kenneth D. Ward, the American ambassador to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, came amid ongoing diplomatic skirmishes over last week's deadly attack in Syria.

Ward used a hastily convened meeting of the organization's executive council to launch a withering verbal attack on Syrian President Bashar Assad and his allies in Moscow.

LATEST TRENDING VIDEOS:Story continues below

The meeting was called to discuss the April 4 attack on the Syrian town of Khan Shaykhun that killed nearly 90 people. The United States and other Western governments blame Assad's regime. Washington in retaliation launched missile strikes on a Syrian air base they say was the starting point for the chemical weapons attack, a move that ratcheted up tensions between the United States and Syria's ally Russia.

Russia and Syria claim the Khan Shaykhun victims were killed by toxic agents released from a rebel chemical arsenal hit by Syrian warplanes.

But Ward insisted it was a deliberate attack that amounted to "a direct affront to the Chemical Weapons Convention and, indeed, a direct affront to human decency, carried out by a State Party" to the OPCW, according to the text of his speech that was posted on the organization's website.

Syria joined the OPCW in 2013 under severe international pressure following a deadly chemical attack on a Damascus suburb. Assad's government told the organization it had a 1,300-ton stockpile of chemical weapons and chemicals used to make them. That stockpile was destroyed in an operation overseen by the Nobel Peace Prize winning-group OPCW, but ever since there have been questions about whether Assad had declared all his weapons.

"On April 4, the lifeless bodies of innocent victims, grotesquely contorted and twisted by the nerve agent sarin, tell the real story," Ward said. "Syria provided a grossly incomplete declaration to the OPCW of its chemical weapons program. Iit continues to possess and use chemical weapons."

He added that "this outrage is abetted by Russia's continuing efforts to bury the truth and protect the Syrian regime" form consequences of using chemical weapons.

Britain's Ambassador, Sir Geoffrey Adams, told the meeting that U.K. scientists have analyzed samples from Khan Shaykhun and they "tested positive for the nerve agent sarin, or a sarin-like substance."

Earlier this week, Turkish doctors also said that test results conducted on victims confirmed that sarin gas was used.

The OPCW's Fact Finding Mission for Syria is conducting an investigation and is expected to report its findings in three weeks. The organization has not revealed any details, citing the need to preserve the integrity of the probe and the safety of OPCW staff.

In Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Thursday that OPCW inspectors should visit both the Syrian air base, which the U.S. said served as a platform for the attack, and Khan Sheikhoun to get a full and objective picture.

He said Russia vetoed a draft U.N. resolution Wednesday because it failed to mention the need to inspect the area of the attack.

"We are deeply worried by our partners in the U.N. Security Council trying to evade an honest investigation into that episode," he said.

Lavrov said he emphasized the need for a wide-ranging OPCW probe during Wednesday's talks in Moscow with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, suggesting that Western nations, Russia and some regional powers could dispatch additional experts to join the investigation.

On July 17, 2014, as passengers checked in at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, “Necro Mancer” (@666_mancer) tweeted about an unusual convoy 1,500 miles east in Ukraine. His citizen intelligence network had noticed a covered anti-aircraft missile system trundling through Donetsk on a low loader. Minutes later, half a world away in Brasilia, Vladimir Putin wrapped up a pre-dawn Russian press conference. His answer to the last question—about the Moscow Metro’s worst accident, two days earlier, which killed 24 people—was overlooked until Russian conspiracy theorists picked it up 15 months later. In the aftermath of the deadliest shoot-down in history, his words acquired a macabre resonance.

“Responsibility should always be personal,” said Putin. “There is a classic example from criminal law called a ‘shooting tragedy,’ when two hunters shoot at a bush thinking there is game there, and accidentally kill a man. Since experts cannot establish who did it, they are both set free … Investigators should expose the guilty party … and they should be held responsible, but only those specific individuals whose fault it was.” By day’s end, questions about guilt and responsibility for MH17’s downing were of global concern. International investigators would range from the official—well resourced and highly trained—to a self-organized group called Bellingcat. Using little more than laptops, open-source materials, and relentless dedication, these “citizen investigative journalists” would find the exact missile launcher, identify dozens of soldiers, and, eventually, reveal a senior Russian soldier with a key role in coördinating the missile launch.

The horror of the MH17 atrocity was peculiarly intimate: in the debris fields, stuffed toys spilled from children’s suitcases. It briefly brought Ukraine’s war into focus in a way that Russia’s misdirection over the annexation of Crimea, or their murky fight in the farthest corner of Europe, had failed to do. However, a deeper and wider war remained concealed.

Andrei Illarionov was Putin’s senior economic advisor, and personal representative to the G8 for five years, until he resigned in protest at growing corruption. Two months before the downing of MH17, he called Ukraine “an introductory chapter” in “the Fourth World War.” (Stalin’s dismal term for the Cold War was “World War Three.”) Illarionov dislikes the phrase, but he says it’s being used “by the Kremlin propaganda machine” for a war “being waged now by Russia against the rest of the world.”

“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

It took the weaponization of information in the 2016 U.S. presidential election for the Western world to start to notice. We now know of e-mails stolen from the Democratic National Committee by Russian hackers, of sophisticated botnets, of similar attacks across Europe; but the full extent of Russia’s activities is still being uncovered. Realizing that we are at war, and understanding how we can fight back, is now urgent business. The story of MH17, and Russia’s exposure, offers a grim but useful case study.

Devices of disinformation

As with the Soviets’ shooting down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983, when 269 died, Russia’s reaction to the international outrage over MH17 was to contrive and deliver counternarratives. A buzzing and growing cloud of ever-changing claims emerged—placing the blame on a Ukrainian fighter jet, Ukrainians on the ground, or the CIA, or claiming that Putin’s private plane was the real target. Russia’s tactics, says Ben Nimmo, senior fellow in information defense at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, rely on what he calls “the 4D approach”: “Dismiss, distort, distract, dismay. Never confess, never admit—just keep on attacking.”

“The single most prevalent Russian response is to attack the critic,” he says. “They use a ‘vilify and amplify’ technique.” Critics are besmirched, sometimes in an official announcement, sometimes through proxies, sometimes through anonymous sources quoted in state media; then paid trolls and highly automated networks of bots add scale. In response, an ad hoc blend of civilians, private companies, and NGOs has evolved to cast a bright, shining light on MH17 and Russian aggression in Ukraine, Syria, and the Atlantic partnership. Exemplifying the values Italo Calvino outlined in Six Memos for the Next Millennium—lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and consistency—their methods are in sharp contrast to the West’s generally sclerotic response to a revanchist Russia.

Nowhere is this weakness more brutally apparent than in Russia’s use of digital technology to reinforce its greatest tool of statecraft: maskirovka. The literal translation—“little masquerade”—disguises the density and importance of this elusive concept. “Military deception” misses its deep cultural roots: maskirovka involves camouflage, denial, and a deep finesse. As James Jesus Angleton, the founding counterintelligence chief of the CIA, put it, “The myriad stratagems, deceptions, artifices, and all the other devices of disinformation … confuse and split the West [with] an ever-fluid landscape, where fact and illusion merge, a kind of wilderness of mirrors.”

Disinformation confuses and splits the West with “an ever-fluid landscape ... a kind of wilderness of mirrors.”

The most powerful weapon in the maskirovka armory is disinformation, a word acquired in the 1950s from the Russian dezinformatsiya. A generation after the Cold War, the acknowledged masters of “deza” are deploying disinformation technology against the compromised immune system of liberal democracy. “And at this point,” says Andrew Andersen, a Russian-born security analyst at the University of Calgary’s Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, “the West is losing.”

“The first thing you need to understand is that this is a war,” says Andersen. “This is not a joke and not a game of any kind. It’s not ‘socializing with your friends on social networks’—it’s a real war. Even those who don’t want to take part have to behave in accordance with the laws of war,” he says, alluding to Trotsky’s notorious epigram, recalled by several of the interviewees for this story, that translates loosely as: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

Even the name of this new style of war is contested territory. “Ambiguous,” “hybrid,” “irregular,” and “nonlinear” warfare have all been suggested. Mark Galeotti, senior research fellow at Prague’s Institute of International Relations, unpicks the issue in his new book, Hybrid War or Gibridnaya Voina? Getting Russia’s Non-Linear Military Challenge Right. He admits to still worrying at it. “The more I think about what we should be calling hybrid war,” he says, “the more I think the answer is: war.”

“The Russians have, fortuitously for them, simply stumbled on a truth of the century.”

“The Russians have stumbled on how the nature of international contestation is changing and will be fought out in the 21st century. It’s an age when direct kinetic warfare [the military’s term of art for ‘things that go bang’] is ridiculously expensive, in political but also economic terms,” he says. “Instead, war will be fought out through a variety of other means, many which are covert, ambiguous, and so on. The Russians have, fortuitously for them, simply stumbled on a truth of the century.”

Foul deeds will rise

Exactly an hour before MH17 took off, Necro Mancer tweeted a tentative identification: “It visually resembles a BUK a lot.” (Buks are a family of Russian-made mobile medium-range surface-to-air missile systems.) A Donetsk man of around 50, he spends “almost all” his free time scanning popular Russian-language social-media sites like Vkontakte (“In Contact”), known as “Russia’s Facebook,” and Odnoklassniki (“Classmates”); listening to pro-Russian channels on the walkie-talkie app Zello; and sharing civilian reports of military activities. As an additional hobby, he uses open sources to curate a list, linked in his Twitter profile, of several thousand Russian and pro-Russian dead, “because they hide them.”

“I cannot fight as a soldier, so I try to do my best,” he says of a conflict that has led to more than 30,000 casualties and millions displaced. He’s just one of many keyboard partisans in the war dominating Europe’s largest country. After the annexation of Crimea, the subsequent invasion of eastern Ukraine, and the MH17 shoot-down, the world’s scrutiny of Russian behavior in the region dwindled. Yet Ukraine—site of the continent’s first military incursion by a neighbor since Stalin subjugated Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain—is, as U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work said in a speech in 2015, “an emerging laboratory for future 21st-century warfare.”

The 34-ton Buk-M1 TELAR (“transporter erector launcher and radar”), and its bodyguard of irregular troops, rolled through the southeast corner of what the Yale historian Timothy Snyder has christened the Bloodlands. Here, in living memory—between 1933 and 1945—a hellish amalgam of Nazis and Soviets (sometimes collaborating, more often at war) were responsible for 14 million civilian deaths. “During the years that both Hitler and Stalin were in power,” Snyder writes, “more people were killed in Ukraine than anywhere else in the Bloodlands, or in Europe, or in the world.”

Half an hour after MH17 took off, another Ukrainian curator, @WowihaY, tweeted that the convoy had passed through his hometown of Torez, 45 miles east of Donetsk, headed to the city of Snizhne. There, the Buk was unloaded from a white Volvo low-loader truck before continuing south under its own power. Passing through checkpoints held by Russian--backed insurgents, it set up in a field and, at 4:20 p.m. local time, fired a 1,500-pound missile 33,000 feet into the air. Carrying a high-explosive fragmentation warhead weighing 154 pounds, it nearly reached Mach 3. On board MH17 were 15 crew and 283 passengers, including 80 children in 20 family groups and a party, led by the virologist and former International AIDS Society president Joep Lange, heading for the 20th International AIDS Conference in Melbourne.

The warhead exploded around four meters to the upper left of the airplane’s nose. Dying bodies fell “like confetti” for around 90 seconds. One female victim crashed through the corrugated roof of a house into a kitchen. Autopsies found hundreds of metal fragments in the captain’s corpse, another 120 in the first officer, and a bow-tie-shaped fragment—unique to the Buk-M1’s 9N314M warhead—embedded in one of the flight crew.

For long days, governments scrambled to negotiate access with hostile irregular forces, probably composed of what Galeotti calls “a mix of regular Russian units, ad hoc collections of nationalists and adventurers, and everything in between.” These auxiliaries, largely organized by the GRU (the Russian army’s foreign military intelligence agency), now controlled what a spokesman for investigators with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) called “the biggest crime scene in the world.” The hot sun glittered. It was summer. It was very warm.

Penetrating the smog of war

Three days earlier Eliot Higgins, a highly regarded citizen journalist, had launched his crowdfunded project Bellingcat in beta. Bellingcat would use open-source information, he promised, “to investigate, collaborate, and report on worldwide issues that are being underreported and ignored … Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Kurdistan, Nigeria, Jihadists, Shia armed groups, the U.K. phone hacking scandal, police corruption, and more.” That “and more” swiftly became the downing of MH17. Bellingcat could have been designed for the challenge. Less than six hours after the shoot-down, Higgins had found, identified, archived, uploaded, and shared a 35-second video—titled in Russian “The Murder Weapon Malaysians Snizhne”—in which the Buk, now led by a single vehicle, rumbled ominously through Snizhne. Two years later, the Dutch-led international Joint Investigation Team (JIT) would use the video in its findings.

The official investigation by the Dutch Safety Board, conducted in parallel with the JIT’s, embodied a century of hard-won knowledge about air accidents. Over 15 months, the $4.8 million investigation reconstructed substantial parts of the Boeing 777. A wealth of expertise fortifies every part of the 279-page report and its 26 appendices, showing precisely how flight MH17 was destroyed. In their effort to find out what happened—and who was responsible—the JIT’s hundreds of investigators have, among other tasks, processed 1,448 pieces of wreckage, heard over 200 witnesses, analyzed 150,000 intercepted calls as well as half a million photos and videos, and produced over 6,000 reports. Although determined to keep their powder exceptionally dry for future criminal prosecutions, last September they presented preliminary results. After noting the efforts of “research collectives like Bellingcat,” they reached an unequivocal conclusion: a Buk-M1 TELAR, armed with 9M38M1 missiles carrying 9N314M warheads, traveled from the Russian Federation into Ukraine, fired from a launch site roughly halfway between the villages of Pervomais’kyi (May Day) and Chervonyi Zhovten (Red October), and then returned to Russia.

On a shoestring budget, using social media and satellite photography, and tapping into a network of obsessives, Bellingcat’s detective work has produced impressive results. In a series of reports, participants identified the actual Buk—unit designation number 332—and its battalion in Russia’s 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade. Comparing dozens of Buks, and analyzing photos shared on Vkontakte between 2009 and 2013, they homed in on seven characteristic markers. These included exhaust deposit patterns, dents, the arrangements of cable connections to the missile erector, fonts (and spacing) on the digits, and the vehicles’ mix of hollow and spoked wheels on each side. A Bellingcat with an intelligence background developed an innovative type of “fingerprinting”: using 3-D software “to solve the problem of comparing two vehicles with perspective-distorted photos,” he noticed there were unique patterns of deformation in the protective rubber side skirts above the wheels.

Bellingcat was also the first to publicly describe the route the Buk took through Russia in late June and into and out of Ukraine before, during, and after July 17. The project has since identified several dozen soldiers associated with Unit 32406—the 53rd Brigade—by piecing together content and friend lists on Vkontakte, cross-referenced with posts on a forum for the often anxious mothers and wives of soldiers. (The murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya wrote movingly on this subject in her essay “My Country’s Army, and Its Mothers.”)

The penumbra of uncertainty

None of this cuts much ice in Russia. The Kremlin’s fog machine went into overdrive. The full panoply of Russian state media, troll farms, semi-automated botnets, and what Russian novelist Nikolai Leskov called “useful fools and silly enthusiasts” began their murky work. The Russian government’s response to the shooting down of MH17 was a charade, wrapped in a travesty, inside a miasma: a relentless campaign of abuse and deceit, trying to entangle every fact of the matter in a net of disinformation. Numerous attempts were made to hack the Dutch Safety Board. Several Bellingcats experienced spear-phishing attacks. Other targets includedFrench and U.K. TV channels, NATO, OSCE, and the Polish, Dutch, Finnish, and Norwegian governments, as well as German political parties.

The primary “threat actor” was a cyber-espionage group called Fancy Bear (which has several names, including Tsar Team, APT28, Strontium, and Iron Twilight): Russia-based, and in all probability controlled by the GRU. As during the operations against the U.S. election last year, Fancy Bear seemed careless about disguising its activities. (FBI director James Comey, testifying to the House Committee on Intelligence in March, called the group “very noisy.”)

Fighting this cyber-espionage is CrowdStrike’s Dmitri Alperovitch (in 2013, one of MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators under 35). He was the lead computer security consultant on the DNC hacks and has been instrumental in identifying major Chinese and Russian hacking groups. Alperovitch grew up in Russia until his family moved to the United States in 1995. Like many people of Russian origin, he has strong feelings about disinformation. “The power of cyber,” he says, “isn’t the ‘cyber Pearl Harbor’ scenario—which we’ve been talking about for 25 years now and hasn’t happened. The real power is in information.”

Alperovitch thinks Russia gets “the true nature of the battlefield” in a way the West does not: “They’ve been thinking about this for a very long time—it actually goes at least as far back as the Tsarist era in the 1860s, when they created one of the first modern intelligence agencies, the Okhranka.” After the 1917 revolution, when the Bolsheviks opened the Okhranka’s archives, “they were shocked to discover how infiltrated they were and how much disinformation had weakened their movement,” he says. “They modeled the KGB on the successes of Okhranka. So they didn’t invent it—they stole it.”

To sunlight we can now add another powerful disinfectant: global, peer-to-peer, open-source investigation.

The highest-ranking Soviet-bloc defector to the West—Lieutenant General Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former chief of Romania’s espionage service—has exposed even deeper roots. In a book he recently coauthored, Disinformation, Pacepa cites the Marquis de Custine, Russia’s Tocqueville, who wrote in 1839: “Everything is deception in Russia.” Custine quotes a distinguished and well-traveled Russian diplomat quietly confessing, “Russian despotism not only pays little respect to ideas and sentiments, it will also deny facts; it will struggle against evidence, and triumph in the struggle!” The tsar, and then Lenin, banned Custine’s work.

The U.S. diplomat George Kennan, whose “Long Telegram” to the U.S. State Department shaped the Cold War and NATO, so admired Custine that he wrote a book about him in 1971. Kennan thought that much of Custine’s analysis still rang true: “the neurotic relationship to the West; the frantic fear of foreign observation; the obsession with espionage; the secrecy; the systematic mystification; the general silence of intimidation; the preoccupation with appearances at the expense of reality; the systematic cultivation of falsehood as a weapon of policy; the tendency to rewrite the past.” (Among Putin’s methods, not least is the effort to ban history books as part of “the war of memories.”) Kennan called Russians “one of the world’s greatest peoples,” but he retained a clear-eyed mistrust of their leaders.

Expectation in the air

“Answer in kind!” commands Edward Luttwak, the eminent if colorful military strategist and historian. Speaking from Moscow, he suggests that we respond aggressively to the global hacking of truth. “There are ample opportunities to hit back,” he says, “but nobody is using them. There are a thousand stories here, openly circulated.” (He shares one picked up in the Beluga caviar bar from two billionaires the previous night.) Putinism can be likened to the Golden Horde “in advanced Mongol form,” he says. “It’s not just the Great Khan who must have billions of dollars: now the companions of the Court must also be multibillionaires.” He suggests using these stories “to ‘disassemble’ Putin.”

To sunlight we can now add another powerful disinfectant: global, peer-to-peer, open-source investigation. On the day Bellingcat opened for business in 2014, Russia began an artillery bombardment from within its own borders, using its own equipment and soldiers. It still lies about the barrage, as it does about most of its actions in Ukraine. Last December, Bellingcat fired back a salvo of truth: an interactive map showing hundreds of artillery strikes on Ukraine made from Russian territory. Open-source investigation was also used by Russia’s opposition leader Alexei Navalny in a recent, virally shared video that exposed the scale of Russian corruption. Bolstered by drone footage documenting the leadership’s spoils, the facts brought out tens of thousands in protests across Russia.

Earlier this year, Bellingcat identified the man who called the instrument of MH17’s destruction “my Buk-M.” In several tapped phone calls released by SBU (Ukraine’s secret service) and the JIT, he was called Sergey Petrovsky. But Bellingcat uncovered his real identity: Sergey Dubinsky, a veteran of Russia’s wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya. The calls begin as MH17 passengers are embarking: Dubinsky can be heard coördinating several still-unidentified people as they head to the launch site. Calling himself “Bad”—from his call sign, “Bad Soldier”—Dubinsky would later prove his identity to a skeptical user on a forum by confirming he owned a black Peugeot 3008: Bellingcat found a dash-cam video showing a black Peugeot 3008 leading the missile-launcher convoy east of Donetsk. Bellingcat also found evidence of Dubinsky acknowledging that he was indeed the voice on the recordings. Instrumental in smashing apart the lives of others, -Dubinsky responded to the Bellingcat reports with an e-mail to the BBC, sent from his home in Russia, that was openly contemptuous, describing his “Homeric laughter.”

Today, at any one time, facts keep a city of several hundred thousand people safely in the air. Most of those air dwellers carry smartphones equipped with the GPS technology that Ronald Reagan accelerated into civilian use in response to Russia’s shoot-down of KAL Flight 007. Perhaps we could gain something similar from MH17: a better global positioning system, this time for information. If it is to work, it is unlikely to be entirely technological.

John Pollock has written for MIT Technology Review about the role of social media in the Arab uprisings (“Streetbook,” July/August 2011) and that of civilians in the Libyan information war (“People Power 2.0,” March/April 2012).

In Moscow, Mr. Tillerson came away from a two-hour meeting with Mr. Putin — the first such face-to-face session of the Trump administration — without reaching agreement on facts involving the chemical weapons assault in Syria or Russian interference in the American election. And sharply diverging from the meeting of the minds between the United States and Russia that Mr. Trump frequently aspired to when he was campaigning, there was no visible warming of the relationship.

“There is a low level of trust between our countries,” Mr. Tillerson told reporters at a joint news conference with his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov. “The world’s two foremost nuclear powers cannot have this kind of relationship.”

The most immediate casualty of the clash was Russia’s decision last week to suspend a communication channel, set up in 2015, to share information about American and Russian air operations over Syria to avoid possible conflict. Mr. Lavrov said on Wednesday that “we’re willing to put it back into force” if Washington and Moscow can resolve their differences.

Further punctuating the Syria dispute, Russia on Wednesday vetoed a Western-backed resolution at the United Nations Security Council that condemned the chemical weapons attack. It was the eighth time in the six-year-old Syrian civil war that Russia, one of the five permanent Security Council members, had used its veto power to shield the government in Damascus. But in a possible sign of Russia’s isolation on the chemical weapons issue, China, the permanent member that usually votes with Russia on Syria resolutions, abstained.

The vote came the day after Mr. Trump spoke by phone to President Xi Jinping of China, whom he hosted last week at a summit at his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Palm Beach, Fla. White House officials said they credited the relationship between the two leaders that was forged during the visit, and the conversation Tuesday evening, with helping to influence China’s vote.

The day began with harsh words from Mr. Trump toward Mr. Putin, whom he had once praised effusively.

“I really think there’s going to be a lot of pressure on Russia to make sure that peace happens, because frankly, if Russia didn’t go in and back this animal, we wouldn’t have a problem right now,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network, referring to Mr. Assad. “Putin is backing a person that’s truly an evil person, and I think it’s very bad for Russia. I think it’s very bad for mankind. It’s very bad for this world.”

Later, after a meeting at the White House with Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general, Mr. Trump went out of his way to praise the military institution, which he called a “great alliance,” and to express disappointment with Russia.

“I would like to think that they didn’t know, but certainly they could have. They were there,” Mr. Trump said of the Russians during a 30-minute news conference at the White House.

Even as they have intensified their criticism of Russia for backing Mr. Assad, other senior Trump administration officials, including Mr. Tillerson and Jim Mattis, the secretary of defense, have been careful to say there is no consensus that Moscow had foreknowledge that the Assad government planned to launch a chemical assault.

“Right now, we’re not getting along with Russia at all — we may be at an all-time low in terms of a relationship with Russia,” Mr. Trump said on Wednesday. Still, he held out hope that the United States and Russia could come to terms, suggesting that Mr. Tillerson’s talks with Mr. Putin had gone better than expected.

A quick détente seemed a remote possibility, given the level of tension surrounding the aftermath of the Syrian chemical weapons attack. On Tuesday, the White House accused Mr. Putin’s government of covering up evidence that Mr. Assad had been responsible for the sarin assault, which was launched from a base where Russian troops are operating.

Mr. Putin shot back that the charge was fabricated and accused the administration of Mr. Trump, who American intelligence agencies believe benefited during the election campaign from Russian cyberattacks intended to embarrass his Democratic rival, of fabricating the evidence to create a fake confrontation.

Amid the rift with Russia, Mr. Trump made a striking reversal on NATO, saying the alliance had transformed into an effective one since he took office.

Mr. Trump attributed his change of heart to unspecified transformations within NATO, which he said were a direct response to criticism he had leveled that the alliance was not doing enough to combat terrorism.

“I complained about that a long time ago,” Mr. Trump said, “and they changed.”

It was not clear what the president was referring to; NATO forces have been fighting alongside the United States in Afghanistan for more than a decade, an effort focused on combating terrorist groups including the Taliban.

Still, the turnabout drew praise from some lawmakers who had been concerned with Mr. Trump’s previous stance.

“Without NATO, the Soviet Union would be quarterbacking half of Europe today and Putin knows it,” said Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska. “NATO is the most successful military alliance in human history. This was the right decision.”

His comments came hours after a senior White House official said the Trump administration had supported the admission of Montenegro into NATO this week, in part to counter the influence of Russia in the small Balkan nation. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the official cited “credible reports” that Moscow had backed a plot for a violent Election Day attack there last fall.

Mr. Trump on Tuesday signed the paperwork allowing Montenegro to enter NATO, two weeks after the Senate approved the move in a March 28 vote. The country’s admission, White House officials said in a statement, should signal to other nations aspiring to join the alliance that “the door to membership in the Euro-Atlantic community of nations remains open and that countries in the western Balkans are free to choose their own future and select their own partners without outside interference or intimidation.”

China, which has since 2011 joined Russia to veto six UN Security Council resolutions on Syria, abstained from a vote Wednesday on a US-led proposal criticizing last week's chemical weapons attack. The move left Russia -- Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's chief ally -- as the only veto-wielding council member to oppose the resolution.

Shi Yinhong, a foreign affairs adviser to China's cabinet and director of Renmin University's Center on American Studies in Beijing, called the abstention a gesture of "considerable goodwill" to Trump. China has opposed military action against Assad's government since Syria's civil war began, urging a political solution instead.

"It shows Xi desires to have a good relationship with Trump, but it could come at the expense of undermining ties with Russia," Shi said. "It's a signal of willingness to cooperate more on the international stage, especially on North Korea's nuclear program."

Trump's conversations with Xi played a role in China's decision to abstain, according to a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. In a statement explaining the vote, China's UN ambassador, Liu Jieyi, said that parts of the resolution required revision, without elaborating.

Trump told reporters he's pushing Xi to pressure North Korea to abandon development of nuclear weapons and missiles capable of striking the US, a program that has also alarmed American allies in Japan and South Korea. Tensions are mounting amid evidence that North Korea is ready to conduct a sixth nuclear bomb test in defiance of UN sanctions.

"President Xi wants to do the right thing," Trump said at a White House press conference Wednesday with Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. "I think he wants to help us with North Korea."

Influential Grandchildren

Both the White House and China's state media have touted the personal bond forged during the roughly 18 hours the two leaders spent together last week, including when Trump's five-year-old granddaughter demonstrated her Chinese language skills for Xi. The senior administration official credited Trump's grandchildren with having a big impact on the relationship.

Trump's threats to challenge China on trade, North Korea and Taiwan risked upending the sensitive diplomatic balance between the world's two largest economies. Chinese officials worked for weeks behind-the-scenes to build ties with Trump and his family, before a February phone call between the two leaders in which he reaffirmed long-standing US policy on Taiwan. That led to last week's summit.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published earlier Wednesday, Trump said he offered to ease trade pressure on China in exchange for help dealing with its unruly neighbor. China helped North Korea fight a US-led coalition to a stalemate in the Korean War and remains the isolated nation's principal trading partner.

Trade, Security

"You want to make a great deal? Solve the problem in North Korea," Trump said, noting such a solution would be "worth having" a trade deficit with China. In the same interview, he said his administration wouldn't formally accuse the country of manipulating its currency to gain a trade advantage, retreating from a core campaign promise.

China opposes even limited US military action against its ally and neighbor, which risks dragging both sides into a broader conflict and send refugees clambering toward its border. In a call with Trump on Wednesday, Xi reaffirmed China's belief that talks were the only way to rid the Korean peninsula of nuclear weapons, according to state media.

The US sent an aircraft carrier battle group into the area this week amid speculation that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un might conduct another nuclear test to mark his grandfather's birthday on Saturday. US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said during an appearance on ABC's "This Week" that the strike on Syria sent a message to Pyongyang, while adding that the administration had "no objective to change the regime in North Korea."

Oil Embargo

The Communist Party-affiliated Global Times newspaper has indicated a willingness in the Chinese government to support stronger measures against North Korea. The Trump administration is considering tougher economic sanctions, including an embargo on oil supplies to North Korea, flight bans, cargo interception and punishment on Chinese banks doing business with North Korea, Reuters reported Thursday, citing unidentified US officials.

Zhou Qi, the director of Tsinghua University's National Strategy Institute in Beijing, said it was logical for China to do more to curb Kim's nuclear program if actions were taken within the UN framework.

"The willingness to cooperate with the new US government has been quite overt," she said. "There's plenty of cooperative space between Washing and Beijing as long as Kim continues to pursue its nuclear program."

»What Is the Kushner Doctrine?13/04/17 10:33 from Mike Nova's Shared NewsLinksmikenova shared this story from di. There may be no better testament to the insanity of our epoch than this: Last week, a series of reports suggested that the president’s 36-year-old son-in-law, a real-estate heir with no experienc...

»What Ivanka wants, Ivanka gets13/04/17 10:32 from Mike Nova's Shared NewsLinksmikenova shared this story from American Thinker. "Donald Trump must get those kids out of the White House," a blunt South African observer of our politics barked at me, weeks back. "You're looking more and more like us." She...

»When Jared Wins - POLITICO Magazine13/04/17 10:29 from Mike Nova's Shared NewsLinksmikenova shared this story . AP Photo Opinion By Rich Lowry Can someone reacquaint Donald Trump with Steve Bannon, his ideologist whom the president now professes barely to know? Trump's jaw-dropping public distancing from Bannon in the ...

»Putin Meets With Tillerson in Moscow12/04/17 15:03 from Mike Nova's Shared NewsLinksmikenova shared this story . Russian President Vladimir Putin met with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in Moscow on Wednesday as tensions between the two countries continued to escalate over the American military strike in Syria, R...

»Trump and Putin - Google Search11/04/17 20:07 from Mike Nova's Shared NewsLinksmikenova shared this story . Trump's White House takes combative posture toward Putin Politico - 1 hour ago “ Trump had a kind of affinity for Putin based on partially seeing in him the kind of leader that he aspired to be and beca...

»Urban Dictionary: cedric11/04/17 09:34 from Mike Nova's Shared NewsLinksmikenova shared this story . cedric A word meaning king of all the land. A word meaning a super sexy , totally cool person . A word meaning a genius. That guy is such a cedric. #king #sexy #genius #sedric #sedrick #cedrick

Reviews

Reviews

The statistical effects of the October 28 Letter | Federal Bureau of Investigation - NYT

"Many good questions could and should al-zo be asked when Mr. Comey testifies in the closed session of the House Intelligence Committee next week... Comey's overall "motivations" might be complex and and at the same time simple: the security of the country. The details of these complexities are not easy to read..." - by Michael Novakhov - 4.25.17

Gangs, Intelligence Services, and Politics

M.N.: It would be unforgivably naive to suppose that the U.S. criminal Underworld is not controlled these days by the Russian Mafia, and, in turn, by the Russian Intelligence Services. It would also be unforgivably naive to suppose that there are no messages contained in the various criminal acts, and that there are no connections between the Underworld's recent operations and the present situation in the U.S., including the present investigations. As a matter of facts and the investigative leads, they might hold and provide the most easily accessible clues. Attention, the FBI and the significant others: do access these clues.

Smoke and Fire: The Trumputkins, the Trumpumpkins, "The Tillerson Ultimatum", and bad, bad Assad

By Michael Novakhov: So, the Trump - Putin mysterious marriage is on the rocks... The unresolved issues, whatever, whoever, and however triggers the attention to them and their discussions, have to be resolved: soundly, timely, fundamentally, and the long-term; otherwise they come back and accumulate, and together with the other unresolved issues, snowball and cause the avalanches. Nobody needs this mess, enough snow jobs everywhere... That's what Mishustin thinks...

"If you really want to fight ISIS, look into its origins and essence first." - Fight Against "ISIS"

In the opinion of the great many observers, those "sham" groups are nothing more than the creations and proxies of the Russian Military Intelligence (GRU), formed on the basis of the coalitions of the disaffected ex- Baathist Saddam's military (and first of all, military intelligence officers, historically tied with the GRU), with the "rebels-for-hire", and the Assad's Syrian Intelligence Services, which are also the proxies of the GRU.

"Trumpism" as the "social-political experiment" and the "Gang of Four"

The engineered election of Donald Trump as the U.S. President is the joint operation of the German, Russian, and Israeli Intelligence Services with the major executive and operational role played by the Russian-Jewish Mafia at the head of the International Organized Crime - by Michael Novakhov

Tillerson's Complaint:

"Lavrov won't dance with me..."

Lavrov's Response:

"My mama done tol' me... A man's a two-face..."

Vovchick "The Tarantula", why were you so "loud"?!

For Russia (or any other state), this extraordinary, unusual, demonstrative, primitive, blatant "loudness" was like digging her own grave with regard to the US - Russian relations, especially at the time when their improvement and the relief of sanctions is so desired by them, and no doubts, they would understand this very well. This peculiarity in this affair points to the possible deliberate set-up from the third party... The US - Russia - Germany triangle and the role of the revived German intelligence in it after the WW2 have to be examined under the most powerful microscope, in all their hidden details, and in the historical perspective.

Mike Nova's Shared NewsLinks Review

Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks

Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks

Howl!

The America of my dreams: Shattered. Raped.

The King Trump - by Michael Novakhov

The public prayers for His Majesty's health, wealth, and well-being, and also for the development of his additional intellectual capacities should be held no less than three times a day in all public squares, government offices, courthouses, and the places of worship, and also in all the private and public toilets, with the benefit of generating the taxable and multiple extra-flushes. Hopefully, it will flush out in due time.

The Information Age

All the relevant information at your fingertips: Information is not a commodity for sale but one of the most vital and important inalienable rights. To paraphrase Descartes: "I have access to information therefore I am". ("Information Age" - post of 11.30-21.13 | Image from: Information - Google Images)